Thanks for what didn't happen

Standing in his West Shore office, Al Scudieri opened an album to a particular page and placed it in front of me. There were half a dozen black-and-white photos of men posing in group shots. It was difficult to make out the faces, but you could tell the men were mostly in their 20s and in good shape.

"This was our FBI SWAT team training at Camp Blanding," said Scudieri, now an investigator with the law firm of James, Hoyer, Newcomer & Smiljanich. "There he is. ... That's Stephen O'Keefe."

The face was mostly a blur, and I took Scudieri's word for it that O'Keefe was a tall, athletic guy and about as tough as they get. "He was a natural leader and the best at what we do in the field as there was."

Edward Stephen O'Keefe died two weeks ago following a skydiving accident in Pasco County in which a gust of wind apparently grabbed his parachute and caused him to crash into the ground. He was 70.

O'Keefe had been a prosecutor in the Pasco-Pinellas State Attorney's Office. Before that he was an FBI agent. He left the FBI during the Vietnam War to serve in the Army Special Forces and the Marine Corps, then returned to the agency.

Scudieri and O'Keefe were FBI agents when they met in 1977.

The sting

"We worked on a sting operation," Scudieri said. "Remember Albert DeSalvo, the 'Boston Strangler?' He was murdered by a guy named Robert Michael Wilson. Anyhow, it was Wilson and two associates, Robert Devlin and William Englehart, who went on a crime spree down the East Coast, killing and beating people up along the way. They were as bad as they get. Wilson was once arrested for cutting up someone Devlin had killed and throwing the body parts in the Charles River.

"We finally got them trying to sell some valuable paintings, including a Van Gogh, they had stolen. The setup was on Treasure Island in Pinellas where one of our agents posed as a buyer. We surrounded them in the parking lot as everyone gathered around a car trunk to get the artwork. ...

"There were guns pointed everywhere but they gave up and we started taking them away. I was riding in the back with Devlin and I asked a cop if he had been searched and was told he had.

"That's when O'Keefe came over. He was the most thorough guy I'd met and he wanted to be sure and did his own search. He made Devlin drop his pants and, sure enough, the pistol fell out of his undershorts.

"I thought about it years later when those two Tampa detectives (Randy Bell and Ricky Childers) were killed when Hank Earl Carr has that pair of hidden handcuff keys and it cost them their lives.

Belated thanks

"I'd never had a chance to mention it to O'Keefe until we got together at a Christmas party about a month ago for retired FBI families. He'd forgotten about it, of course, but down inside I know I owe my life to him.

"There must have been 400 people at his funeral last Saturday and I heard a lot of stories about O'Keefe. Some of them might have been old war stories that grow over the years.

"It didn't really matter. To me he was a hero who not only did his job and loved his country, he saved my life."